Re-evaluating treatment success in trials of peanut oral-immunotherapy: impact of different definitions on efficacy...

Allergen immunotherapy (AIT) is increasingly popular as a treatment strategy for food allergy. Unfortunately, there is significant heterogeneity in reported outcomes, specifically in the dose-thresholds selected for evaluation and the symptoms used to define a "tolerated dose". These considerations are often investigator-driven and do not consider patient perspectives.

A systematic review by the EAACI CO-FAITH taskforce recently flagged the need to better standardize and harmonize outcomes used in clinical trials of food-AIT. Using less objective symptoms to define dose-limiting symptoms can underestimate the reaction threshold determined at baseline food challenge. As a consequence, this can overestimate the efficacy of food-AIT by 15%. In this review, we perform an individual patient data (IPD) meta-analysis using data from three randomized-controlled trials and one real-world registry, to evaluate how the definition of dose "tolerance" impacts upon reported desensitization rates.

This analysis provides insight into how clinical efficacy rates for food-AIT are impacted by using different dose thresholds and definitions for when a dose might be consider tolerated. Using more patient-centric outcomes may be a more useful metric to harmonize reporting of outcomes and inform clinical practice, paving the way towards reaching a consensus on outcome reporting in trials of food-AIT.